Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a self-service hiring platform. More particularly, the invention relates to a heuristically-driven platform and method for hiring based on previously-supported jobs.
Background Information
Finding the path of least resistance between the hiring agent and the candidate for a job is a challenge faced by almost any hiring agent at least once. Every growing company has a common problem: finding people fast enough to meet business objectives.
The Internet has quickly become an important medium for hiring agents and jobseekers alike, easily and effectively allowing broad dissemination of candidate and job and employment information. Job postings, traditionally made on local bulletin boards, paper periodicals, company newspapers, and help-wanted newspaper advertisements, appeared on Internet web pages. In addition to mere job postings, career portals sprang up. “Career portal” is a broad term, and includes various services. One example is an Internet web site that helps centralize a job search by providing links to many different job boards, career management sites, hiring corporations (internal recruiting department), recruiters, staffing companies, and other online resources. A different example of a career portal is an Internet web site of a recruiting agency. There are various other examples too, each being a different enhancement of the simple idea of an online job posting.
With the introduction of these online job postings, career portals, and the like, hiring companies and job seekers enjoyed immediate benefits since the job postings were easier to keep current. Indeed, postings could be continually updated, removed, or added. Also, with the immediacy of the Internet, online job postings became available worldwide to anyone with Internet access.
In spite of such advantage, existing options for finding and managing candidates are highly fragmented and time consuming to manage, often including web postings, advertisements, employee referrals, engaging recruiters, and searching resume bulletin boards.
A hiring agent, when he or she has a job to fill, may not even know where to start. The hiring agent may not be sure whether to use an external recruiter, an internal recruiting department, social media or a job board, or all of these. Moreover, finding the right candidate for the job is an important, even a crucial activity, yet the hiring agent may have great difficulty devoting the time and other resources to the task required.
Efforts have been made to decrease the randomness of the recruitment/hiring process by having a single, dedicated organization manage the process from beginning to end: narrowing the job search by having a well-drafted job description that attracts the right candidates, managing the interview process and so on. It has been found, however, that such a vertically-integrated hiring organization does not scale well, becoming increasingly unwieldy and costly to manage as it becomes larger.
Sitting on top of these problems is a fundamental difficulty in managing a hiring process to ensure that there is a reliable way to review whether a corporate entity's hiring strategy was accurately implemented, realistically adjusted based upon interim results, and met its corporate objectives.
A hiring campaign may go awry at the very beginning with the first publication of the job listing. Drafting a job listing and position description that generates a steady volume of responses from the right type of candidate requires skill and patience. Even a poor selection of job title can have a negative effect on a hiring campaign. Hiring agents often lack the skill or the time that this important task requires.
Today, there is also no realistic mechanism that supports the adjustment of a hiring strategy based upon interim results. The options are usually not well thought out, reviewed or based on previous jobs, so management decisions are made in a vacuum. They “just happen”, leading to erratic results whose only certainty is that they cost money, take time and take resources, with no promise of a positive outcome. Additionally, it is difficult to coherently collect and review interim results with relevant decision-makers. The consequence of this is more sporadic activity and misdirection, often feeding on itself, ultimately costing far more than is reasonable.